philosophy

On the dialectical method - Amadeo Bordiga

A 1950 essay by Amadeo Bordiga on the dialectical method, reviewing the history of dialectics since the time of Zeno of Elea, summarizing the further development of dialectical thought and its culmination in the works of Marx and Engels, distinguishing Marx’s dialectic from the metaphysical dialectic of the German critical philosophers, French materialism and English empiricism, explaining its differences with regard to the traditional scientific method and illustrating its principles by way of an interpretation of the meaning of the “negation of the negation” in Marx’s abstract schema of historical stages, “individual property-capitalism-socialism”.

Joseph Dietzgen - a sketch of his life by Eugene Dietzgen

Joseph Dietzgen

Eugene Dietzgen surveys his father's life. An artisan tanner who educated himself in philosophy and Marxism, befriending Marx & Engels (gaining a complementary mention in Capital), Joseph later came to the aid of the Chicago anarchists in the aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket bombing.
He published several works on his dialectical materialist philosophy and was later criticised by Lenin in his 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'.

Walter Benjamin - Radical Chains

I'm told you raised your hand against yourself / Anticipating the butcher / After eight years in exile, observing the rise of the enemy / Then at last, brought up against an impassable barrier / You passed, they say, a passable one.
From Radical Chains no.2

The Parallax View - Slavoj Žižek

One of Slavoj Žižek's major works on political ontology, complete with trademark crude jokes.

Radicals, Religion and the death of Hitchens

In the few days since Christopher Hitchens died of cancer I've been puzzled by the unqualified tributes by certain 'radicals', for "my enemy's enemy is, only perhaps, my friend"

Domination without a subject (part two) - Robert Kurz

In this concluding Part Two of his essay, Kurz examines the relationship of the ideas of Freud and Marx with respect to the concept of the “constitution of the fetish”, discusses the relation between “first nature” and “second nature” as a developmental process, and outlines the prerequisites for the quest for a tertium genus that will be the goal of the “revolution against the constitution of the fetish”, which is “identical with the supersession of the subject” as the latter has been conceived until now.

Domination without a subject (part one) - Robert Kurz

In Part One of this 1993 essay, Robert Kurz criticizes the largely unexamined assumptions underpinning the “vulgar Marxist” use of such political concepts as power, interest and domination; discusses the development of the more nuanced understanding of these concepts expressed in theories associated with the names of Weber, Michels, Trotsky and Freud; and assesses the role played by structuralism and systems theory in the establishment of an “apologetic” theory of subjectless domination which must be replaced by a “critical and revolutionary praxis” that is no longer Marxism of a “subjective-ideological type”.

Occupy philosophy blog

Came across an OccupyPhilosophy blog run by a bunch of philosophers.

On Immanence and Occupations

Network Diagram

The occupations have provided a space for us to find each other and to have the conversations necessary for dynamic and mobile political forms to emerge. They are as much a process of deterritorializing public space as they are a process of becoming-collective. In this text the author introduces vocabulary and frameworks of thinking for understanding the occupations which aim to aid the occupations in their elaboration and growth.

Chomsky on Psychology

Noam Chomsky interviewed in 1977 by David Cohen on the topic of psychology